Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain

Author:Ben Fountain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

16

BEL-AIR, HOT, POOR, DENSE, VIOLENT, dirty Bel-Air, was a compromise. After a month doing records at the hospital she asked, not quite demanded, to work in the Cité Soleil clinic. Jean-Hubert flatly refused. You’re out of your mind, he said, only people from Cité Soleil can work in Cité Soleil, a boojie girl from up the hill wouldn’t last two days. Misha kept after him. She was going cross-eyed from doing records all day, and she needed space from Jean, who stopped by her office ten or twenty times a day to literally breathe down her neck. Finally they compromised: she would work at the Bel-Air clinic. Another concession: she would continue doing records at the hospital part-time, on Thursdays and Fridays, it was agreed, and Saturday mornings, no need to mention this schedule segued neatly into Saturday afternoons at the cabane. Then Jean pulled her off records temporarily to work on grant applications to USAID through two of its, quote, Development Partners, which consisted of—more quotes—a pair of Private Voluntary Organizations named Hemispheric Development Fund and Global Concern, which in turn, for purposes of embargo compliance, were channeling resources under the rubric of, quote, Emergency Relief, per certification and coordination by some persons somewhere over at USAID comprising something called the Haitian Humanitarian Assistance Office.

She had this. So much of life depended on vocabulary. Lit criticism was vocabulary. The law was vocabulary. Medicine, government, business—if you mastered the vocabulary, you’d gone a fair way toward mastering the field. The exacting idiom of international development put her in mind of medieval scholastic philosophy, wherein learning consisted of slicing observable phenomena into finer and finer strata until reality achieved a kind of subatomic abstraction. So it was in the funding realm of USAID, in which the all-important Organizational Strategic Plan was broken down into multiple Strategic Objectives, which in turn were tranched into Results Packages, themselves sectioned into categories of Result and Sub-Result (Result 1.1, Result 1.2; Result 2.1, Result 2.1.1, Result 2.1.2, etc.) to be attained by the successful completion of sets of Intermediate Results, as determined according to specific Indicators. It wasn’t totally insane, this stuff. She got the need for transparency and accountability, and that certain feudal formalities had to be observed—if you wanted the king’s coin, you had to kiss the king’s ring—but what gradually became apparent was the delusion or even madness implicit in this iteration of the imperial project. All experience, it assumed, could be measured, packaged, and commodified. All experience was thus amenable to corporate dictates of radical efficiency in the administration and allocation of resources, human and material, efficiencies that ultimately served a competitive, market-based, neo-Enlightenment model that promised a rational solution to every problem under the sun.

Perhaps this was the North American version of magical realism. As Misha saw it, she needed to become a combination of social engineer and manbo, an adept of the bureaucratic occult whereby levers were pulled and buttons pushed to produce the desired effect. In practical terms

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